Palantir Acquires Social Analytics Specialist Poptip

Poptip’s analysis of chatter about Hayden Panettiere’s hairdo at the Golden Globes helped guide a L’oreal promo on Twitter.

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Poptip, a two-year-old company that analyzes data from Twitter, is being acquired by Palantir Technologies Inc., one of the most valuable and secretive privately-held startups in Silicon Valley, Poptip announced in a company blog post Tuesday afternoon. The acquisition price has not been disclosed.

The acquisition by Palantir, which specializes in large-scale data mining for the FBI, the CIA, and Wall Street firms, reflects the growing value of Twitter’s data as an indicator of social trends. Palantir is known sniffing out money trails, but the acquisition suggests that it’s seeking better ways to understand unstructured data (such as the language in a Twitter post) and to boost its profile among a more mainstream sort of potential clients.

The two companies seem somewhat incongruous at first glance. Poptip helps name-brand companies analyze chatter on social networks and send targeted messages. During the Golden Globe Awards, women who tweeted about actresses Hayden Panettiere’s and Kelly Osbourne’s slicked-back hairdos received instructions on how they could get the look at home, as well as promotions and deals, in their Twitter feeds. The messages came from L'Oréal Paris, which used Poptip’s software to analyze the tweets and target potential customers.

Palantir, which was founded in 2004 by former PayPal engineers, has raised nearly $900 million dollars in venture funding and was valued at $9 billion in December. The company has focused largely on applying anti-fraud tools developed at Paypal to defense contracting. Palantir’s software reportedly was used in tracking down Osama bin Laden.

In the blog post, Kelsey Falter, who founded Poptip while she was an undergraduate at Notre Dame, said Palantir would provide her company with the resources to continue its mission. “Our work at Poptip was our first foray into real-time data analysis. But we still have so much room to innovate and grow, and Palantir gives us the resources to do just that.”